Category: NJ

Black Friday

There was no repeat of the Christmas music incident last night, so I got a good night’s sleep (or at least as good as I can manage these days). So I may actually be in shape to do a few of the things that I was too frazzled to do yesterday. However, it’s still very cold out: 12° this morning. And Raritan Valley trains are running about 30 minutes behind schedule right now. So, combining those two factors, going into NYC today might be a bad idea. I’m not going to completely rule it out, but I’m definitely not heading out to the train station right now to stand outside in the cold for a half-hour, hoping the train eventually shows up. If I see the trains get back to normal, and if it gets up into the twenties, maybe I’ll go in later.

I started my online Black Friday shopping yesterday, and I think it might be amusing to list out some of the stuff I bought, yesterday and today.

  • I picked up some random comics on Comixology, from DC’s big Black Friday sale. I got Batman: White Knight, which I’ve heard a lot of good things about. And Tales of the Batman: Gene Colan Vol. 2. I really liked Colan’s run on Batman, back in the 80s, after he left Marvel for DC. And I got Grant Morrison’s Wonder Woman: Earth One Vol. 1 and Vol. 2. I generally like anything Morrison does, so I’m pretty sure I’ll like these. (These were $5 each.)
  • I bought Blade Runner 2049 and Isle of Dogs from Vudu. I hadn’t previously bought any digital movies from Vudu, but with the whole Movies Anywhere thing, I can buy from Apple, Amazon, or Vudu and the movies show up in all three libraries, so it makes sense to buy from whichever service is cheapest. (I was originally thinking about going out to see a movie today, but I think that, instead, I’ll likely stay in and watch one or both of those.)
  • I picked up Fantastical 2 for iPad for $3. (It’s regularly $10.) I’ve been using the iPhone version for years, but never got around to picking up the iPad version.
  • I bought a $100 iTunes gift card for $80 from Costco. It seemed like a good deal.
  • This morning, when I went into Lose It to log my breakfast, I got a popup offering a deal on a lifetime subscription. I’m always a bit leery of lifetime subscription deals, but I’ve been using Lose It for five years, and renewing my premium subscription every year, so I went ahead and paid $75 for a lifetime sub. Since I did that in-app, that came out of my iTunes account, nicely using up most of that gift card I bought last night. (Maybe I’ll pick up another $100 card today.)

And here are some things I’m looking at today:

  • Pluralsight has their usual Black Friday sale going on, where you can renew your subscription for $200 instead of $300. I’ll probably do that again this year. I don’t get a ton of use out of Pluralsight, but I guess I get enough that it’s worth the $200.
  • Jetpack has a 30% discount off all plans for Black Friday. I’m currently only using the free Jetpack services on this blog, but I could step up to their “personal” plan. About all that really gets me, beyond what’s in the free plan, is site backups, but that could be useful.
  • Apple’s Black Friday weekend event has started. As usual with Apple, it’s not that compelling. But it might be worthwhile for me, since I was looking at getting some new Apple stuff anyway. On the iPhone front, they only have deals on iPhone 7 & 8, and I was thinking about the XR, so I’ll probably skip those. Their Apple Watch deal is for a $50 Apple Store Gift Card when you buy a Series 3. That’s not much, but might be a good deal for me. My current watch is a “Series 0,” so a Series 3 would be a good step up. I can use the $50 towards my eventual iPhone purchase.
  • I’m thinking about picking up a second Sonos One speaker, either from Sonos directly, or from Amazon or Costco. I get a fair bit of use out of the one I bought earlier this year, and it would nice to have two, for stereo. I don’t know if I really need that, though.
  • It’s not exactly a Black Friday thing, but a friend of mine has a story in this anthology about… cannibalism. On the one hand, I’d like to support him, on the other hand, I don’t much like reading about cannibalism. But hey, it’s only $4 for Kindle.

Since I started writing this blog post, I see that the NJ Transit delays are now at almost an hour, so things on that front are definitely going in the wrong direction. And the temperature is up to 22°, so that’s going in the right direction, but maybe not far enough to motivate me to spend much time outdoors today.

Happy Thanksgiving

My Thanksgiving day this year is off to a rough start. They play Christmas music on Main St here in Somerville now, normally from noon to 8pm, but something threw off the timer a couple of weeks ago, so we’ve had a few instances of overnight Christmas music recently. And last night, it played all night.

It all started after the big snowstorm a week ago. (You might say that it wasn’t that much of a snowstorm, but as the linked article points out, it was “the biggest one-day November snowfall in 136 years.”) That night, the music didn’t end at 8pm, and kept playing until around midnight. My guess is there was a brief power interruption that screwed up the timer. So that wasn’t too bad. Either the timer stopped it at midnight or someone managed to turn it off.

Then, Saturday night, the music started at midnight, and stopped around 2am. My guess on that is that someone screwed up the AM/PM setting on it. (And I guess someone managed to shut it off after a couple of hours.)

I thought we were over all of that, since it’s been fine the last few days. But last night, again, it started at midnight. And never stopped. The last time this happened was back in 2012. That time, I called the police, but there was nothing they could do about it. And I sent an email to the group that’s responsible for the music, and they apologized, which is nice, but none of that gets me back a lost night of sleep. My best guess as to what happened this time is that somebody tried to change the schedule for Thanksgiving and screwed up the AM/PM setting again.

So I got out of bed at 5am this morning and I’m now eating breakfast and listening to some quiet music by Hugar, just loud enough to drown out the Christmas music. (Which is still playing.) It’s looking to be the coldest Thanksgiving since 1871, according to the NY Times. (It’s 20° right now, with a “feels like” temp of 11°, here in Somerville.) I’ve been trying to talk myself into going into New York today, and the continuing Christmas music assault might be enough to force me out of my apartment, even in 20° weather. I don’t really know what I’d do in NYC today; all the museums are closed. I’d probably go see a few movies, I guess.

I did put earplugs in last night, but they didn’t help much. On one of the previous nights, I also turned on my air cleaner, hoping the white noise would help. (It turns out that the earplugs do a good job of filtering out the air cleaner noise, but don’t help much with the music.)

So now I’m thinking about options for better earplugs, noise cancelling earphones, white noise generators, and stuff like that. Here’s a thread from Hacker News from earlier this week, about brain.fm and similar products/services. I’ve been wondering if I could actually use Max Richter’s eight-hour work Sleep to get through the night. I think I also need to look at some of the stuff in this NY Times article from 2011. Bose makes something called Noise-Masking Sleepbuds that might be good, though they cost $250. That got me thinking about whether or not I could sleep with AirPods in. That led me to a reddit thread; results on that seem to be mixed. (And battery life on the AirPods is only five hours, so they wouldn’t last all night.) I’m not at all sure what will work best. I may go on a bit of an Amazon binge today, ordering a bunch of random earplugs and stuff.

Now, it’s almost 7am, and I’ve moved from Hugar to Relaxation Tape for Solo Space Travel by The National Pool (which is quite good). There’s a lot of good ambient music on Bandcamp, but that’s a subject for another day.

This blog post is probably a bit scattershot, since it’s being written on zero sleep, but writing it has helped me get through breakfast and lower my stress level a bit, so that’s something. I’m hoping the Christmas music will stop at 8am, assuming my theory about the AM/PM screw-up is correct. If that happens, I may just go back to bed. (Though the three cups of coffee I just had might get in the way of that.)

Uber and Lyft

This is probably going to be a rambling, incoherent, post. I woke up at 4am this morning, and couldn’t really get back to sleep. Now it’s almost 7am, and I’m trying to have a normal breakfast and proceed with a normal weekday. It’s a little abnormal already, since my car is acting up and the dealer can’t look at until Monday, so I’m probably working from home today. I used Lyft to get to and from work yesterday, and I could do that today too, but I don’t know if I really want to spend $40 just to sit in a cubicle all day and not talk to anyone, which is pretty much what I did yesterday. (It was a productive day. I got a lot of programming done. But zero interaction with coworkers.) On the other hand, if I spend all day alone in my apartment, I might go stir-crazy.

I’ve used Uber several times recently, in New York, during NYCC, and back at home, due to my ongoing car problems. It’s convenient, but a bit expensive. Uber has a pretty bad reputation, of course. I was just looking for a link to include here, but there’s so much bad PR for Uber, you can just search the NY Times and find a bunch of examples. (Here’s one at random.)

I installed the Lyft app on my iPhone a few months ago, but never got around to trying it. So I gave it a shot yesterday. There aren’t as many drivers working in my area as there are for Uber, but there were enough to get me rides back and forth to work yesterday without any hassle. And if you search the NY Times for Lyft, you get mostly financial articles, and none of the bad PR stuff that you see about Uber. So maybe Lyft is a better option, at least from a moral standpoint.

There are a lot of “Uber vs. Lyft” articles on the web. Here’s a pretty reasonable one from How-To Geek. From a user’s standpoint, they’re really similar.

Either way, I feel bad for the drivers. They’re not making a lot of money. Most of the drivers I’ve had recently, when I’ve talked to them, say that they’re working multiple jobs. And, in many cases, I don’t think any of those jobs are providing heath insurance.

UPDATE: I was afraid to hit “publish” on this post this morning, given how loopy I was, but it’s now 7pm, and I’m rereading it, and it’s not that bad. I did decide to go in to work this morning, using Lyft to get there and Uber to get back home. I think I’ve decided that Uber drivers, in this area at least, are a little better than Lyft drivers. Anyway, it’s probably for the best that I didn’t drive today. I was pretty tired in the morning, and again in the evening. I think I was fairly productive at work, at least. But again, I really didn’t have much human interaction and could easily have worked from home.

 

 

Morning walk

I went for a walk this morning and experimented with the Camera+ 2 app on my phone a bit. Nothing super-interesting, but I thought a few of the photos looked good enough to post.

A while back, I took advantage of Apple’s free offer for Obscura 2, but I haven’t tried that yet. I should go for another walk, and try that one out.

morning walk 9/30/18

Somerset Patriots season over

I purchased two seats for a 13-game “mini-plan” for Somerset Patriots games this year, as a sort of experiment. I first went to a Patriots game in 2014, and I’ve been going to more games over the last few years. Only a few games a year, but I’ve enjoyed them. For this year, they offered a 13-game mini-plan that got you some of the benefits of being a season ticket holder, but for just 13 games (for the cost of about 10 single tickets). The games were spread throughout the season. Some were pretty random weekday games, and some were weekend games with fireworks or giveaways. My (overly optimistic) plan was that I’d use one seat myself and give the other to a friend who I know is a big Patriots fan, but who can’t afford tickets that often. What actually happened was that my friend couldn’t make it to most of the games on the plan, so I traded in most of his tickets for other games, and never actually saw him this year. (And I think at least half of his tickets didn’t get used.) As to my own tickets, I only made it to seven or eight games. So I didn’t really come out ahead, financially, versus buying just individual tickets to the games.

One of the benefits of the plan was that it included free playoff tickets, if the Patriots made it to the playoffs. They did, and the “Liberty Division Championship Series” was this weekend. The first two games were in Long Island, and the LI Ducks won both of those. Games three through five were here in NJ and the Patriots, of course, would have to win all three. They did win games 3 and 4 (which I missed). I went to game 5 yesterday, but they lost. So their season is over. Thinking back on it, I’m glad I got out to more games this year than usual.

I don’t know if I’ll try for that 13-game plan again next year, but I might. It’s weird going to a baseball game alone, but not as weird as I thought it would be. And it’s nice to get out of the apartment and sit outside for a while on a summer day. The games are honestly not that exciting, generally, but it’s a chance to get some fresh air and relax, without thinking too much about work or politics or anything.

Stop and Shop is gone

I guess I don’t get out much these days. I decided to go to the Raritan Shop and Shop yesterday to dump some old coins in their CoinStar machine, and when I got there, it was closed down. Apparently, it closed back in November 2017.

Since there’s a ShopRite practically across the street from my apartment, I haven’t bothered to go anywhere else for groceries in quite some time. Back during the years after PathMark had closed and before ShopRite opened, I used to go to Stop and Shop almost every week. (Occasionally, I went to Wegman’s.)

I should probably get out more and check out some other supermarkets occasionally. There’s a Whole Foods opening in Bridgewater in March. That could be interesting. The idea of an Amazon-owned grocery store makes me a little uncomfortable though.

I did go to Wal-Mart today in Manville, to use their CoinStar, but I didn’t buy anything. I hadn’t been there in a long time either; they seems to have expanded the store and added a full grocery section since I was last there.

Anyway, I’m glad I have a ShopRite in walking distance. I like being able to do all my grocery shopping without ever needing to get in a car. That’s something I take for granted, and I really shoudn’t.

Reinventing Local News

Here’s an interesting effort to help “reinvent” local news. The gist of it seems to be that we should put aside a certain amount of money from FCC auctions of local TV licenses to help set up new “cutting edge” local news sources. I’m not too optimistic that this will happen, or that it would result in quality, long-term, local news for New Jersey if it does. But, hey, it’s worth a shot. The local news situation in NJ is pretty weak.

We’re focusing first on New Jersey. Sandwiched between the New York and Philadelphia media markets, New Jersey receives little to no coverage of its state and local governments. New Jersey owns four public TV licenses, which the FCC estimates could fetch as much as $2.3 billion at auction.

Source: Our Last, Best Chance to Reinvent Local News

Pope Francis Names Joseph Tobin to Lead Archdiocese of Newark

From the NY Times:

Francis’ pick is Joseph W. Tobin, currently the archbishop of Indianapolis. He made national headlines last year when he rebuffed Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, now the Republican vice-presidential nominee, by refusing to stop Catholic Charities from resettling a family of Syrian refugees.

And:

Archbishop Tobin [..] is replacing Archbishop John J. Myers, a conservative who is among a small minority of American prelates who announced long ago that Catholic politicians who support abortion rights should not receive Holy Communion.

Also:

Myers’s tenure was hobbled in recent years after he failed to ensure that a priest convicted of child sexual abuse no longer had access to children.

Myers is the guy who spent half a million dollars of church money on upgrades to his retirement home.

I have a lot of snarky comments in my head about all this upheaval in the church, but I’m going to withhold them all and just say that I’m following Francis’ reforms with some interest and lots of hope.

Archbishop Peter L. Gerety Dies at 104

…he had erased a multimillion-dollar deficit in the archdiocese, in part by selling a lavish archbishop’s mansion in a gated community in West Orange and settling instead in a rectory in the North Ward of Newark, a city still scarred by the race riots of the 1960s.

Source: Peter L. Gerety, Oldest Archbishop Who Preached Social Justice, Dies at 104

I kind of remember Archbishop Gerety from back when I was a kid. He probably came to our parish once or twice. I didn’t know much about him then, but, reading his obituary, he sounds like the kind of archbishop the Church can be proud of. (Unlike this guy and his fancy retirement house.)

Garden State Comic Fest

I went to Garden State Comic Fest today. It was a bit of a last-minute decision, since I didn’t even know it was happening until I saw a tweet about it on Friday from Jim Steranko. I haven’t been to a con like this in quite some time. I’d call it a medium-size con. Plenty of dealers and a fair number of guests. And, unlike some other cons, the guests were primarily comic book writers and artists. (No pro wrestlers, reality TV stars, or washed-up sci-fi actors from the 70s. Not that there’s anything wrong with any of that…)

I got three books signed: my copy of  Legion Annual #3, by Greg LaRoque; a Dick Tracy comic, by Joe Staton; and a hardcover First Wave collection, by Rags Morales. All three of those guys were very friendly, and it was cool to meet them.

I didn’t see Steranko there, though maybe I just didn’t look hard enough. I did see Walt and Louise Simonson, but their table was (rightly) very busy, so I didn’t get to talk to them or get anything signed. Greg Hildebrandt had a very nice Tolkien book for sale, but it was a bit too expensive for me ($100).

I picked up a few random hardcovers and paperbacks for really low prices (all between $5 and $9), so my reading pile is now another eight or so inches higher. I didn’t pick up any individual issues, but I did flip through some dollar boxes, and enjoyed looking at some random old comics. So, overall, worth the trip and the $25 admission.